Solved Using pyvirtualdisplay - Python 2.7 / Selenium Web Driver

[Tahseen Jamal]

Below is the code am writing in FreeBSD. Before this code, I did pkg install xorg-vfbserver but after this I don't know which environment variable to set. Like in Ubuntu you have to do like this before using this program
apt-get install xvfb
export DISPLAY =:1

In FreeBSD, what is the environment variable to set ? I read USES = DISPLAY but I couldn't understand as there isn't much of information about it. And because of that the Firefox starts and closes

from pyvirtualdisplay importDisplay
from selenium import webdriver

try:
[INDENT]display =Display(visible=0, size=(800,600))
display.start()[/INDENT]
except:
[INDENT]print"no virtual display found"[/INDENT]


driver = webdriver.Firefox()

driver.get('www.google.com')

driver.close()

display.open.terminate()

 

[junovitch@]

It's still $DISPLAY. What shell are you using and what is the exact error you see? If you are using the default tcsh(1) then the syntax is setenv DISPLAY :0. If you are using a Bourne like shell then the syntax you had earlier is correct.

 

[Tahseen Jamal]

Hi junovitch@, thanks for the reply. Below are the steps I had to follow

To setup X Virtual Frame Buffer
sudo pkg install xorg-vfbserver
sudo pkg install xkeyboard-config
sudo pkg install xkbcomp
sudo pkg install x11-fonts/xorg-fonts


To start virtual frame buffer on display :1, you use below command. You can also set it in your rc file to start at boot
nohup Xvfb :1 -screen 0 800x600x16 > /dev/null 2>&1
Observe, I choose display :1 and therefore, it is this value to be set in the environment variable, which I will mention below

Install firefox
sudo pkg install firefox
If you don't create machine-id in /etc using dbus-uuidgen, your firefox would crash the moment it starts
sudo dbus-uuidgen > machine-id
sudo mv machine-id /etc/

Check your SHELL value
echo $SHELL

If it is /bin/tcsh then use below command
setenv DISPLAY :1
Note :1 because in Xvfb also I used :1

Now you don't even need pyvirtualdisplay and you don't have to initialize display in python. Just use selenium library and webdriver as below

from selenium import webdriver
from time import sleep

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('www.google.com')

#please use WebDriverWait instead of sleep. I am using sleep just for this example
sleep(2)

driver.close()